by Ouida
Day after day, therefore, she returned and gazed on the three gods of forgetfulness, and on all the innumerable forms and fables which bore them company; the virgin field of her unfilled mind receiving the seeds of thought and of fancy that were scattered so largely in this solitude, lying waste, bearing no harvest.
Of these visits Arslàn himself knew nothing; towards him her bold wild temper was softened to the shyness of a doe.
She dreaded lest he should ever learn what she had done; and she stole in and out of the old granary, unseen by all, with the swiftness and the stealthiness which she shared in common with other untamed animals, which, like her, shunned all man- and womankind.
And this secret — in itself so innocent, yet for which she would at times blush in her loneliness, with a cruel heat that burnt all over her face and frame — changed her life, transfigured it from its objectless, passionless, brutish dullness and monotony, into dreams and into desires.
For the first time she had in her joy and fear; for the first time she became human.
All the week through he wrought perforce by night; the great windows stood wide open to the bright, cold moon of early spring; he worked only with black and white, using color only at sunrise, or on the rare days of his leisure.
Often at nightfall she left her loft, as secretly as a fox its lair, and stole down the river, and screened herself among the grasses, and watched him where he labored in the mingling light of the moon, and of the oil-lamp burning behind him.
She saw these things grow from beneath his hand, these mighty shapes created by him; and he seemed to her like a god, with the power to beget worlds at his will, and all human life in its full stature out from a little dust.
The contrast of this royal strength, of this supreme power which he wielded, with the helpless exhaustion of the body in which she had found him dying, smote her with a sorrow and a sweetness that were like nothing she had ever owned. That a man could summon hosts at his command like this, yet perish for a crust! — that fusion of omnipotence and powerlessness, which is the saddest and the strangest of all the sad strange things of genius, awoke an absorbing emotion in her.
She watched him thus for hours in the long nights of a slow-footed spring, in whose mists and chills and heavy dews her inured frame took no more harm than did the green corn shooting through the furrows.
She was a witness to his solitude. She saw the fancies of his brain take form. She saw the sweep of his arm call up on the blank of the wall, or on the pale spaces of the canvas, these images which for her had alike such majesty and such mystery. She saw the faces beam, the eyes smile, the dancing-women rise, the foliage uncurl, the gods come forth from the temples, the nereids glide through the moonlit waters, at his command, and beneath his touch.
She saw him also in those moments when, conceiving no eyes to be upon him, the man whom mankind denied loosened rein to the bitterness in him; and, standing weary and heartsick before these creations for which his generation had no sight, and no homage, let the agony of constant failure, of continual defeat, overcome him, and cursed aloud the madness which possessed him, and drove him on forever in this ungrateful service, and would not let him do as other men did — tell the world lies, and take its payment out in gold.
Until now she had hated all things, grieved for none, unless, indeed, it were for a galled ox toiling wounded and tortured on the field; or a trapped bird, shrieking in the still midnight woods.
But now, watching him, hearing him, a passionate sorrow for a human sorrow possessed her. And to her eyes he was so beautiful in that utter unlikeness to herself and to all men whom she had seen. She gazed at him, never weary of that cold, fair, golden beauty, like the beauty of his sun-god; of those serene deep-lidded eyes, which looked so often past her at the dark night skies; of those lithe and massive limbs, like the limbs of the gladiator that yonder on the wall strained a lion to his breast in the deadly embrace of combat.
She gazed at him until she loved him with the intense passion of a young and ignorant life, into whose gloom no love had ever entered. With this love the instinct of her womanhood arose, amid the ignorance and savagery of her nature; and she crouched perpetually under the screen of the long grass to hide her vigil, and whenever his eyes looked from his easel outward to the night she drew back, breathless and trembling, she knew not why, into the deepest shadow.
Meantime, with that rude justice which was in her, she set herself atonement for her fault — the fault through which those tender little bright-throated birds were stretched dead among the first violets of the year.
She labored harder and longer than ever for her taskmaster, and denied herself the larger half of even those scanty portions which were set aside for her of the daily fare, living on almost nothing, as those learn to do who are reared under the roof of the French poor. To his revilings she was silent, and under his blows patient. By night she toiled secretly, until she had restored the value of that which she had taken.
Why did she do it? She could not have told. She was proud of the evil origin they gave her; she had a cynical gladness in her infamous repute; she scorned women and hated men; yet all the same she kept her hands pure of thefts and her lips pure of lies.
So the weeks ran on till the hardness of winter gave way to the breath of the spring, and in all the wood and orchard around the water-mill the boughs were green with buds, and the ground was pale with primroses — a spring all the sweeter and more fertile because of the severity of the past winter.
It became mid-April, and it was market-day for Yprès, and for all the other villages and homesteads lying round that wondrous cathedral-spire, that shot into the air, far-reaching and ethereal, like some vast fountain whose column of water had been arrested, and changed to ice.
The old quiet town was busy, with a rich sunshine shed upon it, in which the first yellow butterflies of the year had begun to dance.
It was high noon, and the highest tide of the market.
Flower-girls, fruit-girls, egg-sellers, poultry-hucksters, crowds of women, old and young, had jolted in on their docile asses, throned on their sheepskin saddles; and now, chattering and chaffering, drove fast their trade. On the steps of the cathedral boys with birds’-nests, knife-grinders making their little wheels fly, cobblers hammering, with boards across their knees, traveling peddlers with knapsacks full of toys and mirrors, and holy images, and strings of beads, sat all together in competition but in amity.
Here and there a priest passed, with his black robe and broad hat, like a dusky mushroom among a bed of varihued gillyflowers. Here and there a soldier, all color and glitter, showed like a gaudy red tulip in bloom amidst tufts of thyme.
The old wrinkled leathern awnings of the market-stalls glowed like copper in the brightness of the noon. The red tiles of the houses edging the great square were gilded with yellow houseleeks.
The little children ran hither and thither with big bunches of primroses or sheaves of blue wood-hyacinths, singing. The red and blue serges of the young girls’ bodices were like the gay hues of the anemones in their baskets; and the brown faces of the old dames under the white roofing of their headgear were like the russet faces of the home-kept apples they had garnered through all the winter.
Everywhere in the shade of the flapping leather, and the darkness of the wooden porches, there were the tender blossoms of the field and forest, of the hedge and garden. The azure of the hyacinths, the pale saffron of the primroses, the cool hues of the meadow daffodils, the ruby eyes of the cultured jonquils, gleamed among wet ferns, gray herbs, and freshly budded leafage. Plovers’ eggs nestled in moss-lined baskets; sheaves of velvet-coated wallflowers poured fragrance on the air; great plumes of lilac nodded on the wind, and amber feathers of laburnum waved above the homelier masses of mint and marjoram, and sage and saxafrage.
It was high noon, but the women still found leisure-time to hear the music of their own tongues, loud and continuous as the clacking of mill paddles.
In
one corner an excited little group was gathered round the stall of a favorite flower-seller, who wore a bright crimson gown, and a string of large silver beads about her neck, and a wide linen cap that shaded her pretty rosy face as a great snowy mushroom may grow between the sun and a little ruddy wild strawberry.
Her brown eyes were now brimming over with tears where she stood surrounded by all the treasures of spring. She held clasped in her arms a great pot with a young almond-tree growing in it, and she was weeping as though her heart would break, because a tile had fallen from a roof above and crushed low all its pink splendor of blossom.
“I saw her look at it,” she muttered. “Look at it as she passed with her wicked eyes; and a black cat on the roof mewed to her; and that moment the tile fell. Oh, my almond-tree! oh, my little darling! the only one I saved out of three through the frosts; the very one that was to have gone this very night to Paris.”
“Thou art not alone, Edmée,” groaned an old woman, tottering from her egg-stall with a heap of ruffled, blood-stained, brown plumage held up in her hand. “Look! As she went by my poor brown hen — the best sitter I have, good for eggs with every sunrise from Lent to Noël — just cackled and shook her tail at her; and at that very instant a huge yellow dog rushed in and killed the blessed bird — killed her in her basket! A great yellow beast that no one had ever seen before, and that vanished again into the earth, like lightning.”
“Not worse than she did to my precious Rémy,” said a tanner’s wife, who drew after her, clinging to her skirts, a little lame, misshapen, querulous child.
“She hath the evil eye,” said sternly an old man who had served in the days of his boyhood in the Army of Italy, as he sat washing fresh lettuces in a large brass bowl, by his grandson’s herb-stall.
“You remember how we met her in the fields last Feast-night of the Three Kings?” asked a youth looking up from plucking the feathers out from a living, struggling, moaning goose. “Coming singing through the fog like nothing earthly; and a moment later a torch caught little Jocelin’s curls and burnt him till he was so hideous that his mother could scarce have known him. You remember?”
“Surely we remember,” they cried in a hearty chorus round the broken almond-tree. “Was there not the good old Dax this very winter, killed by her if ever any creature were killed by foul means, though the law would never listen to the Flandrins when they said so?”
“And little Bernardou,” added one who had not hitherto spoken. “Little Bernardou died a month after his grandam, in hospital. She had cast her eye on him, and the poor little lad never rallied.”
“A jettatrice ever brings misfortune,” muttered the old soldier of Napoleon, washing his last lettuce and lighting a fresh pipe.
“Or does worse,” muttered the mother of the crippled child. “She is not for nothing the devil’s daughter, mark you.”
“Nay, indeed,” said an old woman, knitting from a ball of wool with which a kitten played among the strewn cabbage-leaves and the crushed sweet-smelling thyme. “Nay, was it not only this very winter that my son’s little youngest boy threw a stone at her, just for luck, as she went by in her boat through the town; and it struck her and drew blood from her shoulder; and that self-same night a piece of the oaken carvings in the ceiling gave way and dropped upon the little angel as he slept, and broke his arm above the elbow: — she is a witch; there is no question but she is a witch.”
“If I were sure so, I would think it well to kill her,” murmured the youth, as he stifled the struggling bird between his knees.
“My sister met her going through the standing corn last harvest-time, and the child she brought forth a week after was born blind, and is blind now,” said a hard-visaged woman, washing turnips in a basin of water.
“I was black-and-blue for a month when she threw me down, and took from me that hawk I had trapped, and went and fastened my wrist in the iron instead!” hissed a boy of twelve, in a shrill piping treble, as he slit the tongue of a quivering starling.
“They say she dances naked, by moonlight, in the water with imps,” cried a bright little lad who was at play with the kitten.
“She is a witch, there is no doubt about that,” said again the old woman who sat knitting on the stone bench in the sun.
“And her mother such a saint!” sighed another old dame who was grouping green herbs together for salads.
And all the while the girl Edmée clasped her almond-tree and sobbed over it.
“If she were only here,” swore Edmée’s lover, under his breath.
At that moment the accused came towards them, erect in the full light.
She had passed through the market with a load of herbs and flowers for one of the chief hostelries in the square, and was returning with the flat broad basket balanced empty on her head.
Something of their mutterings and curses reached her, but she neither hastened nor slackened her pace; she came on towards them with her free, firm step, and her lustrous eyes flashing hard against the sun.
She gave no sign that she had heard except that the blood darkened a little in her cheeks, and her mouth curled with a haughtier scorn. But the sight of her, answering in that instant to their hate, the sight of her with the sunshine on her scarlet sash and her slender limbs, added impulse to their rage.
They had talked themselves into a passionate belief in her as a thing hellborn and unclean, that brought all manner of evil fates among them. They knew that holy water had never baptized her; that neither cross nor chrism had ever exorcised her; that a church’s door had never opened to her; they had heard their children hoot her many a time unrebuked, they had always hated her with the cruelty begotten by a timid cowardice or a selfish dread. They were now ripe to let their hate take shape in speech and act.
The lover of Edmée loosened his hand from the silver beads about her throat, and caught up instead a stone.
“Let us see if her flesh feels!” he cried, and cast it. It fell short of her, being ill aimed; she did not slacken her speed, nor turn out of her course; she still came towards them erect and with an even tread.
“Who lamed my Rémy?” screamed the cripple’s mother.
“Who broke my grandson’s arm?” cackled the old woman that sat knitting.
“Who withered my peach-tree?” the old gardener hooted.
“Who freed the devil-bird and put me on the trap?” yelled the boy with the starling.
“Who flung the tile on the almond?” shouted the flower-girl’s lover.
“Who made my sister bring forth a little beast, blind as a mole?” shrieked the woman, washing in the brazen bowl.
“Who is a witch? — who dances naked? — who bathes with devils at the full moon?” cried the youth who had plucked the goose bare, alive; and he stooped for a pebble, and aimed better than his comrade, and flung it at her as she came.
“It is a shame to see the child of Reine Flamma so dealt with!” murmured the old creature that was grouping her salads. But her voice found no echo.
The old soldier even rebuked her. “A jettatrice should be killed for the good of the people,” he mumbled.
Meanwhile she came nearer and nearer. The last stone had struck her upon the arm; but it had drawn no blood; she walked on with firm, slow steps into their midst; unfaltering.
The courage did not touch them; they thought it only the hardihood of a thing that was devil-begotten.
“She is always mute like that; she cannot feel. Strike, strike, strike!” cried the cripple’s mother; and the little cripple himself clapped his small hands and screamed his shrill laughter. The youths, obedient and nothing loth, rained stones on her as fast as their hands could fling them. Still she neither paused nor quailed; but came on straightly, steadily, with her face set against the light.
Their impatience and their eagerness made their aim uncertain; the stones fell fast about her on every side, but one alone struck her — a jagged flint that fell where the white linen skirt opened on her chest. It cut the skin, and
the blood started; the children shrieked and danced with delight: the youths rushed at her inflamed at once with her beauty and their own savage hate.
“Stone her to death! Stone her to death!” they shouted; she only laughed, and held her head erect and stood motionless where they arrested her, without the blood once paling in her face or her eyes once losing their luminous calm scorn.
The little cripple clapped his hands, climbing on his mother’s back to see the sight, and his mother screamed again and again above his laughter. “Strike! strike! strike!”
One of the lads seized her in his arms to force her on her knees while the others stoned her. The touch of him roused all the fire slumbering in her blood. She twisted herself round in his hold with a movement so rapid that it served to free her; struck him full on the eyes with her clinched hand in a blow that sent him stunned and staggering back; then, swiftly as lightning flash, drew her knife from her girdle, and striking out with it right and left, dashed through the people, who scattered from her path as sheep from the spring of a hound.
Slowly and with her face turned full upon them, she backed her way across the market-place. The knife, turned blade outward, was pressed against her chest. None of them dared to follow her; they thought her invulnerable and possessed.
She moved calmly with a firm tread backward — backward — backward; holding her foes at bay; the scarlet sash on her loins flashing bright in the sun; her level brows bent together as a tiger bends his ere he leaps. They watched her, huddling together frightened and silent. Even the rabid cries of the cripple’s mother had ceased. On the edge of the great square she paused a moment; the knife still held at her chest, her mouth curled in contemptuous laughter.
“Strike now!” she cried to them; and she dropped her weapon, and stood still.
But there was not one among them who dared lift his hand. There was not so much as a word that answered her.
She laughed aloud, and waited for their attack, while the bell in the tower above them tolled loudly the strokes of noon. No one among them stirred. Even the shrill pipe of the lame boy’s rejoicing had sunk, and was still.